No matter how big or small you are, how much money you’ve invested into your infrastructure, how many levels of redundancy you have, or how many IT gods and gurus you’ve hired to watch over your website – the fact of life is that your website will go down, even if it’s for a brief moment. Â And you should be ready for that moment. Â Here is a good example that I came across recently – BannersBroker.com maintenance screen.
It looks simple and and straight-forward. Â But if you are even remotely familiar with web development and design, you can appreciate how much thinking actually went into this one. Â First of all, the mere fact that there is a maintenance screen, means that someone thought plenty about the website. Â Secondly, it’s very well composed. Â The big yellow helmet and large, bold “Under maintenance” letters both tell you exactly what’s going on. Â It’s not a user error. Â It’s not a crashed server. Â It’s not something to report to the webmaster. Â They are working on it. Â Thirdly, it tells you exactly when to come back – in 30 minutes. Â Fourthly, it still provides you with an emergency contact information – phone number and email. Â Fifthly, it gives you something to do for thirty minutes that the site is going to be down – explore the company’s YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter stream. Â Sixthly, it reinforces the company brand. Â Twice, in full color and full name, and in black-and-white small logo. Â Seventhly, it doesn’t have any useless junk. Â What else could you wish for?
To me, this is up there with Twitter fail whale and GitHub 404.
Alas, I have never seen that screen. Every night since I joined BB (which was Aug 6) the website has been down for maintenance for 2.5 hours starting 6am est with is 9pm here in Australia. When this happens I have never seen a maintenance screen. It’s just an ‘oops, internet explorer could not connect’. No good for recruiting folks during prime time down under.
I have to agree with you in that BB could use more uptime. It’s unavailable way too often. And even when it is working, there is not enough “real time” going on. Sometimes the same state of panels is shown for days. I’m not asking for an update every second, but at least once an hour should be there.